oday was a day of intense meaning and intense fun. All but the little kids started their day at Yad Vashem, the Israeli National Memorial and Museum for the Holocaust. Zvi introduced the site by talking about the shift that Israeli society has gone through. At first, Israelis never talked about the victims, only those who fought in the resistance. Today, society recognizes that all victims of the Holocaust need to be honored and remembered as martyrs of the Jewish people.

He then led us on a guided tour of the museum. He not only explained the various exhibits, but he also described how the impressive architecture of the place enhances the message of the museum. The message is a very Israeli one. It says that in Europe we were stateless and effectively powerless. The modern state of Israel is a response to the Holocaust: We now have a sovereign state, an army and the power we need to ensure that a Holocaust never again will happen to the Jewish people.

After the main museum, we visited the very moving Children’s Memorial, where mirrors make five candles look like millions. In the background you can hear being read the names and ages of children who were killed.

Before meeting back up with the little kids, who had been at the zoo, Rabbi Howie and Rabbi Jen led a short but meaningful memorial service for the 6 million Jews who were killed. Rabbi Howie shared the story of his grandfather’s experience in the Holocaust. He also told us what his grandfather taught: that it is our responsibility to live life for those who couldn’t. The Israeli response is one of Jewish sovereignty and power. As American Jews, we can respond by living full Jewish lives — seeking out the meaning, the life and the hopes of our tradition and passing them on to our children.

We then made the transition from memorial to joy as we met for lunch with the next generation, the little kids.

After lunch we headed to the archaeological site at Bet Guvrin National Park, where we actually assisted in an active archaeological dig. We had a wonderful guide who introduced us to the area and explained that we would be digging at Tel Maresha, which last had been a city at the time of the Maccabees. We then descended into a cave, where we were handed pickaxes and trowels, and we started to dig. EVERYONE in the group found shards of pottery, and some found more substantial pieces of ancient plates, bowls and storage containers...items that had not been touched by people for more than 2,000 years!

Following the dig, some members of our group took a tour of several completely excavated caves that are lit by electric lights and display some big finds, including an olive press. The more adventurous of us and all of the kids went to explore caves that were lit only by candles. That group had a lot of fun crawling on their stomachs through tiny holes, into the different caverns. Josh DeLott, our resident 6-foot, 8-inch Jew, got a big cheer from the kids when he made it through the smallest of the holes.

We listened to a brief talk about what the archaeologists will do with the pieces we found, and we then were invited to take a few pieces of pottery shards with us as souvenirs.

The evening was free, and people used the time to enjoy all that Jerusalem has to offer.

hen we picked our “blog day,” little did we know that we’d end up with both the best and the worst day of all. Best, because this day, filled as it was with the most interesting and moving sights to date (at least in my opinion), gives me a lot of material. And worst for the same reason.

As to the easy stuff, today was the day that a young member of our group went missing. We got off the bus at Bet Guvrin, the site of our archaeology adventure, which looked to be a big pile of sandy rubble in the middle of nowhere in the desert, with the sun high in the sky and the mercury at around 98 degrees. A fellow mom says, “Wait, where’s [insert name of child]? I can’t find him!” A number of us shared a pang of parent panic until we realized that he safely was asleep on the bus on his way to the gas station with the bus driver (who thought we all had gotten off the bus). It wasn’t so bad — we were able to get in touch with the driver very quickly. And the missing person was embarrassed but probably cooler than we were.

Second, also at Bet Guvrin, one of the youngest of the group actually had the nerve to answer with total candor one of those tour guide “And kids, do you remember what a *** is?” questions. She stated flat out that no, she didn’t remember what it was, because “[she] must have been asleep during that part.” So we all had a good laugh that we needed after our previous experience.

Bet Guvrin itself was a really happy surprise for a number of the adults, including me. We had way more fun than we expected, sitting in the cool dirt and digging with our pails at a real live, ongoing archaeological dig. I was very surprised that it wasn’t some kind of pretend spectacle for tourists but an actual working dig at the site believed to be Maresha, an ancient city of the Nabotean civilization. And we got to be our Type-A selves again, trying to see if our group could make the most interesting find. We found at least 50 shards of pottery that was used around 2,200 years ago. On average, 30 percent of what’s found by tourists like us evidently is useful to the real archaeologists: It is catalogued and perhaps reassembled. We also got to buy T-shirts that read “Israel Archaeological Sites — We Dig Israel,” which gave us an opportunity to feel really old, as we discovered that our kids didn’t get the joke. It seems that the use of “dig” has gone the way of lava lamps, “You bet your bippy” and “Groovy.” Full circle back to the archaeology theme: parents as the latest of the relics of an ancient civilization.

In the morning we went to Yad Vashem, at least those of us 12 or older. The under-12s got off easy and went to the zoo. How can you write something pithy and cute, in good travelogue style, about Yad Vashem? It reminds me of that old joke about Jewish holidays, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” Or, translated to our context, after Yad Vashem we met up with the zoo-goers and all had lunch together in the cafeteria at Yad Vashem. All kidding aside, after the darkness into which we had just been thrust, it felt great to go back up to the brightness of the daylight and hear the little ones tell all about the soda and the snacks and the animals, and about how all that Jory did was eat and sleep and not look at the animals.

It’s so difficult to know where to start to describe Yad Vashem. One could write for days (that is, if one wasn’t rushing to be back on the tour bus at 7:30 A.M.), and there are so many themes one could choose from all that raw data (and raw seems the right word). Given the circumstances, and perhaps that I haven’t digested it all yet, I thought I would just list some of the things in the museum that were particularly affecting for me, with apologies for any information I’ve remembered incorrectly:

The films of survivor Bluma Wallach, of Lodz, Poland, who looked like she could be a friend of my parents (although, ahem, a little older), sitting having coffee in our suburban kitchen, telling the story of pinching her mother’s cheeks at Auschwitz to make her look healthier so that she would be selected by the Nazis to work rather than be gassed immediately.

The picture of a wealthy Hungarian family, all of whom later died in Treblinka, seated at a table with beautiful silver and crystal, sort of in the style of a so-called “table picture” that you might take of guests at a bar mitzvah party or wedding today, complete with a stout matriarch at the center of the table who looked just like my maternal grandmother.

The poem on the wall, by a priest as I recall, something like:

They came for the Communists, and I didn’t object, for I wasn’t a communist.
They came for the socialists, and I didn’t object, for I wasn’t a socialist.
They came for the Jews, and I didn’t object, for I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to object.

The film showing the shining, happy faces of young Germans as they shoveled Jewish books into a bonfire.

The doll that belonged to a child who never left the Trieste concentration camp.

The film in which a survivor of the mass starvation in the Lodz ghetto tells about the time he and his family managed to scrape together a bowl of soup for him to bring to his grandmother, who was ill. He was around 9 years old at the time. He arrived at his grandmother’s house to find her in bed, already dead. But instead of running off screaming, his belly spoke first, and he looked to see if he could find any food she might have hidden. He ate the bread he found under her pillow, along with the soup. Then he ran off to tell his family the news.

The recollections of Eliahu Rosenberg, a Treblinka survivor (I think), talking about working outside the gas chambers at Treblinka. He spoke of the terrible deceptions used by the Nazis to get the Jews to move quickly and peaceably to their deaths, like the signs in the train station, one arrow pointing to the train to Prague, one to somewhere else, and the recording instructing passengers that this stop is just a stopover and another train will take them to a place of their choice. He said that the gas used at Treblinka was slower acting, so the Nazis had to wait awhile and listen to make sure all the Jews were dead before they could open the doors of the trains. He told of hearing a lot of coughing and cries of “Mama” and “Tateh” before the last terrible gasp of death and then silence. At that point, one of the Nazis would shout out “Alles schlaffte” [sic] — Everyone is sleeping.

The filmed recollections of Rita Weiss, another lady who looked like a past mah-johngg crony of my mom’s. She spoke of arriving at Auschwitz with her sister and their two children. As the lines of prisoners were separated and separated again, she and her sister managed to stay together with their kids, holding their hands. Finally, when they arrived at the final separation point, Mengele kicked Rita to the other line, and she dropped her son’s hand. She heard him cry out, “Mommy, where are you?” But, he was swallowed up by the crowd, and she never saw him again. She said that she only hopes he found her sister and didn’t die alone in the crematorium.

It goes on and on and on.

And then we have lunch…in Israel where we know we always can go…and we hug the kids a little more tightly before we eat.